One I know the file path, I usually use a Notepad++ feature:

Search-> Find Chars In Range-> Non ASCII

Mike

From: Kirkendall, Garrett <Garrett.Kirkendall@amd.com>
Sent: Friday, February 5, 2021 7:11 AM
To: devel@edk2.groups.io; Feng, Bob C <bob.c.feng@intel.com>; Kinney, Michael D <michael.d.kinney@intel.com>; Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>
Cc: Pham, Tony Q <tony.q.pham@intel.com>
Subject: RE: [edk2-devel] EDK2

[AMD Official Use Only - Internal Distribution Only]

0x9d is one of those pesky "smart quotes" many applications love to use.  These are the double quote or single quote characters that slant left and right instead of the straight up and down like the ASCII versions.

They can be very hard to track down in a source file because a lot of editors have very subtle slants to the smart quotes.

This usually happens when you copy from one app like MS Word and paste into your source file.

Garrett Kirkendall
SMTS Firmware Engineer
7171 Southwest Parkway, Austin, TX 78735 USA
AMD facebook  |  amd.com

From: devel@edk2.groups.io <devel@edk2.groups.io> On Behalf Of Bob Feng via groups.io
Sent: Thursday, February 4, 2021 11:40 PM
To: devel@edk2.groups.io; Kinney, Michael D <michael.d.kinney@intel.com>; Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>
Cc: Pham, Tony Q <tony.q.pham@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [edk2-devel] EDK2

[CAUTION: External Email]

Tony,

This build failure should be caused by one of your c or header files have non-ascii characters.

You may need to change the basetools’ code to see which file has non-ascii characters

Change C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\StrGather.py, Line 536

except:

            EdkLogger.error("UnicodeStringGather", AUTOGEN_ERROR, "SearchString: Error while processing file", File=File, RaiseError=False)

raise

to

except:

            EdkLogger.error("UnicodeStringGather", AUTOGEN_ERROR, "SearchString: Error while processing file", File=File, RaiseError=True)

Thanks,

Bob

From: devel@edk2.groups.io <devel@edk2.groups.io> On Behalf Of Michael D Kinney
Sent: Friday, February 5, 2021 11:30 AM
To: Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>; edk2-devel-groups-io <devel@edk2.groups.io>; Kinney, Michael D <michael.d.kinney@intel.com>
Cc: Pham, Tony Q <tony.q.pham@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [edk2-devel] EDK2

Hi Andrew,

If the character is part of the code (not a comment), the ignoring the codec error could silently produce the incorrect FW behavior.

I prefer a failure with a correct identification of the file/line # so the file can be fixed.

The EDK II CI checks will not allow files in with these types of issues.

Mike

From: Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 4, 2021 4:11 PM
To: edk2-devel-groups-io <devel@edk2.groups.io>; Kinney, Michael D <michael.d.kinney@intel.com>
Cc: Pham, Tony Q <tony.q.pham@intel.com>
Subject: Re: [edk2-devel] EDK2

On Feb 4, 2021, at 3:58 PM, Michael D Kinney <michael.d.kinney@intel.com> wrote:

Hi Tony,

I suspect that one of your UNI files being processed by StrGather has an invalid Unicode character in it.  Can you review the UNI files in the module that is being build when this error is generated?

I would be better if this code identified the file/line number with the issue, so that would be a good Bugzilla to enter.

Mike,

I hit something like this too writing some Python. I think I ended up telling the codec to ignore errors, so that might be another option? This I think the issue I saw was in C code. 

Thanks,

Andrew Fish

Mike

From: devel@edk2.groups.io <devel@edk2.groups.io> On Behalf Of Pham, Tony Q
Sent: Thursday, February 4, 2021 1:39 PM
To: devel@edk2.groups.io
Subject: [edk2-devel] EDK2

Hi,

I have a problem with build.py

(Python 3.9.1 on win32) Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\build\build.py", line 2635, in Main

    MyBuild.Launch()

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\build\build.py", line 2433, in Launch

    self._BuildModule()

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\build\build.py", line 1895, in _BuildModule

    Ma.CreateCodeFile(True)

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\ModuleAutoGen.py", line 1832, in CreateCodeFile

    for File in self.AutoGenFileList:

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\Common\caching.py", line 28, in __get__

    Value = obj.__dict__[self._function.__name__] = self._function(obj)

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\ModuleAutoGen.py", line 983, in AutoGenFileList

    GenC.CreateCode(self, AutoGenC, AutoGenH, StringH, AutoGenUniIdf, UniStringBinBuffer, StringIdf, AutoGenUniIdf, IdfGenBinBuffer)

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\GenC.py", line 2044, in CreateCode

    CreateUnicodeStringCode(Info, AutoGenC, StringH, UniGenCFlag, UniGenBinBuffer)

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\GenC.py", line 1706, in CreateUnicodeStringCode

    Header, Code = GetStringFiles(Info.UnicodeFileList, SrcList, IncList, Info.IncludePathList, ['.uni', '.inf'], Info.Name, CompatibleMode, ShellMode, UniGenCFlag, UniGenBinBuffer, FilterInfo)

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\StrGather.py", line 563, in GetStringFiles

    Uni = SearchString(Uni, sorted (FileList), IsCompatibleMode)

  File "C:\edk2\BaseTools\Source\Python\AutoGen\StrGather.py", line 532, in SearchString

    for Line in Lines:

  File "C:\Users\tqpham\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python39\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode

    return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 5457: character maps to <undefined>

- Failed -

Build end time: 13:36:22, Feb.04 2021

Build total time: 00:00:02